Livestreaming polo!
By Alex Webbe
The prospects of watching some of polo’s top international matches that include the United States Open Championship, the Cartier Queens Cup and the Jaeger-LeCoultre Gold Cup for the British Open have allowed polo players and enthusiasts from around the globe to have the opportunity to see the top horses and players in the game compete at the highest level. The fact that the polo community isn’t embracing it commercially is disappointing.
A handful of companies that include ChukkerTV, PoloCam.TV and Horseplay Productions have made major investments in camera equipment, crews and announcers in an effort to support and promote the game without the greater polo community rallying to assist their efforts.
The absence of commercial sponsors, the reticence of clubs to allow the use of drones for aerial coverage of the games and the spotty audio and transmission that some broadcasts have had to endure could all be rectified with the infusion of commercial revenue.
Prestigious sponsors step up to attach their names to international tournaments in an effort to brand their products and appear at major tournaments that may attract several thousand spectators while a potential market of millions of viewers remains unapproached.
Technology is moving forward at breakneck speed, and with it is the opportunity for sponsors to partner with the “sport of kings” to advance the branding and recognition of their products as well helping to promote and popularize the sport itself.
The lack of participation by sponsors to jump into livestreaming is to be expected given the reluctance of the industry to accept radio and television in their infancy.
In 1897 British mathematician and physicist Lord Kelvin was quoted as saying “Radio has no future”, and American radio pioneer Lee DeForest said “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.,” in 1926.
As late as 1946 20th Century-Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck said “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”
An estimated 1.6 billion television sets were in use globally in about 1.42 billion households as of 2011. The TV viewing audience was estimated to be about 4.2 billion people in 2011.
Approximately 89 percent of all homes in the world have TVs, and about 61 percent of the world’s population watches TV. However, TV viewing was declining as of 2013, with ratings decreasing for both broadcast and cable networks. Ratings for some major televised events also were decreasing.
The popularity of the Internet is a significant factor in the declining popularity of TV. Approximately the same number of people is active on Facebook as the number of people who watch TV, as of 2014, and Livestreaming opens the door to a huge potential audience of consumers.
The Livestreamig of sports on the Internet ls nothing new, but the Livestreaming of the game on the Internet is. The National Basketball Association streams its playoff games online–they are, of course, also on television. But the league is reporting a 93% increase in online viewers over last year’s totals. It essentially means they’ve doubled their live streaming audience in a single year. More than 114 million views were recorded in the first week of the playoffs alone.
It’s not too surprising in this case, because the NBA broke online viewer records during the regular season as well. In fact, live-streaming audiences are up for most major sporting events year-over-year, including the Masters and the NCAA March Madness tournament.
The World Cup shattered another ratings record in the Internet streaming of sporting events. ESPN’s live streams have logged 30 million viewing hours during the 2014 World Cup, enough to make the tournament the most-streamed live sporting event in the United States ever.
For comparison’s sake, the 2012 Summer Olympics generated 20.4 million viewing hours online, according to NBC. And 13.6 million were live.
The Winter Olympics earlier this year generated 10.8 million viewing hours, with about 80% of those live.
There are numerous reasons why the World Cup is bigger — starting with the fact that live streaming is becoming more popular with each passing month as people get more comfortable with streaming apps, and companies make them easier to use.
The same strides can be made in the polo world, but it is going to take mutual understanding by the sponsors, clubs and associations. It is also going to take a major commercial sponsorship influx that will allow these efforts to become more professional in their presentations, more reliable in their broadcasting capabilities and more accepted in the sporting world.
If the international polo community hopes to promote, expand and popularize the sport, it’s time for some forward thinking and a united effort.